Firebird has secured a U.S. export license for 45,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs under an investment agreement with the government of Kazakhstan, NVIDIA reported. The announcement coincided with an official visit to Astana by NVIDIA founder and chief executive Jensen Huang on Friday, Oct. 23.
The first phase of Firebird's project is under construction with Kazakhtelecom at Data Center Valley, with commercial operations scheduled for the third quarter of 2027. A planned second phase would increase Firebird's potential capacity in the country to roughly 500 megawatts. Firebird, led by co-founder and chief executive Razmig Hovaghimian, also plans to launch Firebird Labs Kazakhstan to provide local startups with funding and compute access.
Kazakhtelecom has already installed 400 NVIDIA H200 and 480 NVIDIA B300 GPUs across Astana and Almaty. Next year, the state telecommunications operator plans to deploy more than 1,000 GPUs at Data Center Valley, alongside more than 1,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs in the Ekibastuz region.
Startup investments and autonomous vehicles
NVIDIA announced an investment into Kazakhstan-founded startup Higgsfield AI during an event at Alem.AI, the nation's artificial intelligence center. Higgsfield plans to expand its infrastructure using NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems hosted on cloud service providers to scale generative media applications.
Mobility platform inDrive and autonomous driving developer Pony.ai have also agreed to explore robotaxi services in Kazakhstan. The companies plan to run tests in Astana using Pony.ai's seventh-generation vehicles, supported by the NVIDIA Hyperion sensor and compute architecture and the NVIDIA Halos safety system.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev presented Huang with the Order of Dostyk, First Class, following talks at the Akorda Presidential Palace. Officials from the International Judo Federation, including president Marius Vizer and executive committee member Timur Kemell, subsequently awarded Huang an honorary black belt.
